Drearily Derivative
Written: Jan 22 '03 (Updated Jan 27 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Obviously spent money on the special effects ....
Cons: ... instead of on good writing or plot development.
The Bottom Line: A highly derivative horror film, its style consists entirely of jumping out at you and yelling Boo, repeatedly.
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| sussmanbern's Full Review: Darkness Falls |
DARKNESS FALLS is a horror movie. They spent money on special effects ... and even involved three different labs on the special effects, including George Lukas's Industrial Light and Magic. Three guys worked up the screenplay. Yet the closing credits have more showmanship than the whole movie.
DARKNESS FALLS is the name of a place. Yes, we are supposed to believe that there is a town somewhere (within an 10 hour drive from Las Vegas!) named Darkness Falls. We don't ever see the waterfall that supposedly gave it that name; in fact, the town seems to be remarkably flat and right on the ocean. A hundred years ago the town had a wealthy spinster who enjoyed making a gift of a gold coin to every child who lost a baby tooth. She was, for no particular reason, horribly disfigured in a fire, and thereafter wore a porcelain mask and would visit the children only under the cover of darkness. And then she was falsely accused and hanged for killing a child, and on the scaffold she vowed that she would return and punish the town by visiting each child the night after he or she lost the last baby tooth ... and if the child saw her, she would murder the child in some hideous way. Yes, I am sure that a generous and innocent spinster would come up with a complicated curse like that, in her last few moments.
Anyway, about a century later, a kid named Kyle who has just lost his last tooth (even though he looks to be 12) peeks and sees the ghost hovering in his room. He screams and dashes out of the bedroom - knowing that the ghost will avoid the light - but his momma goes in to prove there's nothing there - and she's torn limb from limb.
Twelve years later the same Kyle is a heavily medicated insomniac in Las Vegas when he gets a call from his old playmate from his hometown. It seems her little brother, who just lost his last tooth, is being hospitalized for serious symptoms including an insistence on keeping the lights on at all times. Kyle recognizes the symptoms and comes to help.
OK, that should set the stage. The ghost is hovering around in the dark, or at least in the deep shadows, looking to pick off its victims, even grown-up Kyle. It wears an expressionless white mask, somewhat like the hockey masks in the Halloween and Jason movies. It avoids the light, as in several other movies. It targets children at night, like the Freddy Kruger movies.
Considering three guys worked on the screenplay, you'd expect something more logical and more polished that this stinker. Watching this movie, you will learn the following - that hospitals and police stations have nothing more substantial than C batteries to fall back on during power failures, that lighthouses are unattended even after their light fails and unprotected from intruders and the controls are real easy to figure out, that the utility company is indifferent to power outages, that even when a hospital cannot keep its lights on its elevator will still run, nurses never carry flashlights, when you come to a hospital with minor injuries it's best to let your old classmate rather than a nurse or doctor do all the treating, a fairy tale book with a story about destroying one ghost is perfectly reliable for figuring out how to destroy another ghost, that it's perfectly sensible to hold a kerosene lantern over a pool of leaked gasoline, etc. You'd think, if the curse of this vengeful ghost were the real thing, that the town's junior high could hold its classes in a broom closet, and people might take notice of the epidemic of child deaths - instead it turns out that Kyle's momma was the last unnatural death that anyone can recall, and even 12 years later they seem to have no other topic of conversation. This movie seems to be written by people who just lost their own last baby teeth, so logic is not featured in this movie.
Quite frankly, as a horror movie, this movie's whole technique is, first, to tell you that the ghost is hideous and horrible, and, then, to pop out and scream Boo at you every few minutes. This gets tiresome fairly fast. I'll let you in a little secret: Despite all the teasing, you hardly see the ghost, and then always with its blank porcelain mask, until the last reel ... at which point the face of the ghost is not particularly scary, certainly not appreciably different from Freddy Kruger's face or the Phantom of the Opera.
In other words, this movie is overblown and underdeveloped. There is nobody in this movie that you know or would want to know. It was filmed in Australia (and the crew member responsible for the police guns is called the "Armourer"), but pretends to be American. Oddly enough, it's rated PG-13, altho it can best be appreciated by someone with the mind of a pre-teenager.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
sussmanbern
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Reviews written: 373
Trusted by: 16 members
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